White Angel Breadline, San Francisco

1933

Beginning with an 11th-century Mimbres earthenware bowl and ending with Chuck Close's 1970 painting Keith, the special exhibition "Made in America: Ten Centuries of American Art" weaves together many strands that form the rich creative tapestry of American culture. This exciting survey, on view in the Dayton Hudson gallery from February 5 to April 30, 1995, presents a glorious treasury of American masterpieces. Instead of the conventional Eurocentric approach to art, "Made in America" highlights the contributions of the many African-American, Native American, and Euro-American artists who, for more than 1,000 years, have helped forge our artistic heritage."Made in America" features 160 masterworks in a wide range of media and drawn from the collections of five participating museums: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Toledo Museum of Art, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City), and the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh). Six years ago this consortium presented "Impressionism: Selections from Five American Museums," an exhibition that attracted record numbers of visitors at each site. The overwhelming response to that show inspired its organizers to develop a successor. The result is "Made in America," which may well represent the greatest assemblage of American painting, not to mention other fine-arts media, in the Midwest since the Chicago World's Fair of 1933.The exhibition is divided into eight sections that chronicle the story of American art and culture from ancient to modern times: "Ancient America," "Colonial and Federal America," Democratic Vistas," "American Impressions," "Native American Art," "Artistic Interiors," "The Modern Age," and "Art after World War II." Within each section, visitors can view an array of objects—paintings, sculpture, pottery, decorative arts, textiles, and photographs—by more than 150 artists, both celebrated and lesser-known figures. Included among the familiar names are Paul Revere, Benjamin West, Frederic Church, Alfred Stieglitz, Frederic Remington, Mary Cassatt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Winslow Home, Thomas Eakins, Georgia O'Keeffe, Dorothea Lange, Romare Bearden, Maria Martinez, David Smith, and Andy Warhol.To Kate Johnson, the chair of the Institute's educational division, the show contains "everything from soup to nuts" and reflects the organizing institutions' desire to create an inclusive exhibition. In planning the exhibition and catalog, this "concern for diversity was always in the back of our minds," adds Johnson. Both exhibition and catalog pose the question "What is American art?," but neither attempts to answer it, Instead, as the consortium museum directors have jointly stated, the purpose of the effort is to revise our thinking about how we, as individuals and as members of the community, should approach American art and use our rich visual history to learn "about both our past and, through reflection, our present, maybe even our future."After it Minneapolis debut, "Made in America" will travel to the other four consortium museums, giving to each host community the opportunity to enjoy another major exhibition of extraordinary quality and broad appeal. It also gives visitors a chance to see familiar objects from their own local museum in a new setting and combined with works of art from the other participating institutions.Just as important, the exhibition provides a social and artistic context that many of the museums' permanent-collection galleries do not always offer. Show organizers believe that the chronological and thematic arrangement of objects of different media will make the visitor keenly aware of the range of creative expression and ideas that flourished throughout the country's history. For example, in "Art after World War II," works executed in 1963 are grouped together to draw attention to the provocative issues both artists and American society at large were confronting that year: Andy Warhol's pop icon Double Elvis hangs next to Gordon Park's Malcolm X, Harlem and across from Robert Rauschenberg's Tracer, which alludes to America's involvement in Vietnam. Elsewhere in this gallery a vinyl-coated-steel wire chair designed by Harry Bertoia in 1956 is displayed beside a 1950 earthenware plate by Maria Martinez of the San Ildefonso Pueblo.Since most of the works in "Made in America" have never before been shown together, their juxtapositions invite comparisons that are, according to Kate Johnson, "full of ironies and contradictions that will help visitors discover multiple layers of meaning." For example, the first gallery of the show reveals what Johnson considers the "darker side of American history": Pottery made by Native Americans during the 11th to 17th centuries is displayed next to paintings and decorative arts from Colonial and Federal America, an age when Euro-Americans were exploiting the people native to the so-called New World. In the "Democratic Vistas" section, George Caleb Bingham's The County Election offers a cynical commentary on the unsavory politics that tainted America in the early 1850s and provides a startling counterpoint to Thomas Cole's The Architect's Dream of 1840, which portrays an idealized world imagined by a romantic genius.One benefit of a consortium arrangement is that it makes available a wealth of resources for organizing and mounting an extremely ambitious exhibition. The consortium model allows the participating museums to share both the expenses and the major responsibilities entailed—from arranging transportation of works of art to grant writing to managing the finances and budget. Besides having access to the outstanding art collections of five superb museums, each collaborating partner could tap the knowledge and creative ideas of the other four museum staffs as well. For instance, the Institute and The Saint Louis Museum of Art worked together to publish the fully illustrated catalog, while The Carnegie Museum of Art produced a 15-minute educational video to complement "Made in America." More than 25 curators contributed their expertise by writing concise entries on works of art from their museum's collection or general essays on the social and artistic milieu for the catalog. "Made in America: Ten Centuries of American Art" clearly demonstrates what can happen when five partners pool their resources—artistic, financial, imaginative, and administrative—to produce an extraordinary exhibition.Kathleen Motes Bennewitz is the Institute's educational-materials writer.This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Additional funding has been provided by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.Promotional support has been provided by Target stores.Related ImagesWinslow Homer, 1836-1910. The Country School,1871. Oil on canvas. The Saint Louis Art Museum, purchase.New Mexico, Mongollon, Mimbres, Bowl, about 1000-1200, earthenware and pigment, the Saint Louis Art Museum, purchase.Chuck Close (born 1940), Keith, 1970, the Saint Louis Art Museum, purchase, funds given by the Shoenberg Foundation, Inc.Louis H. Sullivan, 1856-1924, and George G. Elmslie, 1871-1952, designers. Bank Teller's Wicket, 1907-8. The National Farmer's Bank, Owatonna, Minnesota. Copper-plated cast iron. The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Florence Scott Libbey Bequest in memory of her father, Maurice A. Scott.Andy Warhol (1928-87), Double Elvis, 1963, synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen on canvas, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., lent by the Estate of Andy Warhol.Gordon Parks (born 1912), Malcolm X, Harlem, 1963, gelatin silver print, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Christina N. and Swan J. Turnblad Memorial Fund.Footed Pitcher, 1835-50. Probably New York State. Non-lead glass, blown and tooled with applied decoration. The Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey.George Caleb Bingham (1811-79), The County Election, 1851-52, oil on canvas, the Saint Louis Art Museum, purchase.Thomas Cole (1801-48), The Architect's Dream, 1840, oil on canvas, the Toledo Museum of Art, purchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, gift of Edward Drummond Libbey.Dorothea Lange, 1895-1965. White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933. Gelatin silver print. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the John R. Van Derlip Fund.Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1848-1907. Victory, 1892-1903, cast about 1912. Gilded bronze. The Carnegie Museum of Art, purchase.Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1764-1820, designer. Klismos Chair, 1808. White oak, yellow poplar, white pine, cane, and reproduction silk fabric. The Saint Louis Art Museum, purchase: funds given by the Decorative Arts Society in honor of Charles E. Buckley.John Singer Sargent, 1856-1925. Mrs. Cecil Wade (Frances Frew Wade), 1886. Oil on canvas. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation.

Hall and Kate Butler Peterson had been watching with great interest the Institute's frequent and popular photography exhibitions, noting that they were all drawn from the collections of such museums as the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, and The Art Institute of Chicago. The Petersons' energetic advocacy of the MIA's expanding public role inspired them to suggest to then-director Anthony Morris Clark their creation of a purchase fund for the formation of a permanent collection of photographs, both historic and contemporary. This collection would then position the Institute among those other forward-looking arts museums as an active center for the acquisition, display, and study of this vital and ubiquitous art form.What began as an annual donation of discretionary purchase funds expanded into a five-year program, which actually continued for seven years, until the Petersons and their children moved to Massachusetts. This was ample time to fulfill their goal of demonstrating to other donors the efficacy of focused, consistent support in initiating and sustaining a new curatorial department.The timing of this beginning was nearly perfect. In 1972 and continuing through the late '70s, only a handful of commercial galleries in the United States exhibited and sold photographs. The burgeoning photography market of today was a mere speculative fantasy of a few entrepreneurial dealers; the auction houses of Christie's and Sotheby's were just beginning to develop photography programs; and the prices for even the most important photographers' work, like that of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Alfred Stieglitz, were relatively low.In the course of the intervening years, which included the publication of The Making of a Collection in 1984, our collection has grown impressively through the generous support of numerous donors, like Harry Drake, Lora and Martin Weinstein, Ingrid Lenz and Alfred Harrison, and other advocates of the Department of Photography. The new permanent photography gallery was named in memory of the Harrison's son, Martin Lenz Harrison. The Harrison's unparalleled vision, encouragement, and support has inspired the greatest momentum to the quality and depth of the collection since its inception more than 20 years ago.Currently the collection holds roughly 9,000 photographs—an ample and convincing fulfillment of the Petersons' faith in the dynamic character of photography, in this museum's commitment to this new collection area, and importantly, in our public's continuing interest in photography."Photography: The Collection Grows, 1983-96," which runs May 31 through August 24, 1997, is a selection of the most important photographs acquired by purchase and gift between 1983 and 1996. It is meant to honor and thank the many benefactors who have nurtured and continue to nurture the collection's advancement and growth, and to celebrate photography's rich artistic legacy. The selection is a concise overview—the top 100 prints from the very earliest years of photography to the most recent. Following the exhibit's presentation in the MIA's Harrison Photography Gallery, it will travel to the Jundt Art Museum at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, thanks to the enthusiastic support of James R. and Joan Jundt of Wayzata, Minnesota.Carroll T. Hartwell is the curator of Photography."Photography: The Collection Grows, 1983-96"
May 31 through August 24, 1997
Harrison Photography GalleryRelated ImagesJock Sturges
American, born 1947Christina, Misty Dawn, and Alyse, Northern California, 1989
Gelatin silver print
Gift of funds from Myron KuninBernice Abbott
American, 1898-1991A. Zito Bakery, 259 Blecker Street, Manhattan, 1937
From Retrospective portfolio
Gelatin silver print (1982)
Gift of the William R. Hibbs FamilyDorothea Lange
American, 1895-1965White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933
Gelatin silver print (1950s)
The John R. Van Derlip FundJean-Eugène-Auguste Atget
French, 1857-1927Magasin, Avenue des Gobelins, 1925
Aristotype
Gift of Roberta C. DeGolyerHarold E. Edgerton
American, 1903-1990Milk Drop Coronet
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Harold and Ester Edgerton Family FoundationAndré Kertész
American (born Austria-Hungary), 1894-1985Satiric Dancer, Paris, 1926
Gelatin silver print
The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund

Dorothea Lange: American Photographs
January 6-March 3, 1996
Photography Gallery
This exhibition is the first major retrospective of Lange's work to look at both her early documentary work during the Depression and her work documenting important wartime changes in California such as the relocation of Japanese-Americans and the operation of fast-growing war industries in Richmond. Approximately 90 to 100 photographs will be exhibited, most of them vintage and many of which have never before been exhibited or published. This is the first solo exhibition of Lange's work to be seen at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. It is organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.Related ImageMarch 13, 1942, Oakland, California
Following evacuation orders, this store, at 13th and Franklin streets, was closed. The owner, a University of California graduate of Japanese descent, placed the "I AM AN AMERICAN" sign on the store front on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. Evacuees of Japanese ancestry will be housed in War Relocation Authority centers for the duration.
Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.